In the beginning of the Internet revolution, being connected was all about
the simple hyperlink. Like magic with one click a Web browser could be
transported anywhere on the Internet that content lives.

But what about context? What about connecting related information and
content in a semantic context? The hyperlink of the early era isn't
enough.

Enter Microformats, which offer the promise of helping Web
content owners enable users to connect the disparate dots that connect
content in a semantic way. To be more precise and borrowing from the
official Microformats.org definition, "Microformats are small bits of HTML
that represent things like people, events, tags, etc. in Web pages."

Though the term "microformats" may not yet be mainstream, mainstream vendors
have taken notice. Big names like Technorati, Mozilla, IBM, Microsoft,
Google, Digg, and Yahoo among countless others are all at work trying to
make microformats work. By some estimates there are already hundreds of
millions of microformatted pieces of information online.

"At this point, nearly every Web designer that learns about microformats
starts using them," Tantek Çelik,
chief technologist at Technorati and co-founder of Microformats.org, told
InternetNews.com. "Because microformats require only some HTML
authoring ability, millions of Web authors and designers are able to use
them immediately. This is a much lower barrier to entry than many previous
Web technologies, such as XML and RSS, which require the skills of a
programmer."

Where are microformats used today?

Technorati uses microformats throughout its products, including its main blog
search portal. Technorati tags are built from the rel-tag
microformat, which enables bloggers to "tag" their individual blog posts with
categories/keywords relevant to the posts in a visible manner. Technorati
also publishes microformats, like hCard on its contact page and on users'
profile pages in support of social-network portability.

The new Digg user profiles support the hCard microformat, as do the new
Google Sharing user profiles. Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing site also
extensively makes use of microformats, including hCard, as well as adr and
geo specifications for locations.

Though microformats enable semantic Web connections, Mozilla's User
Experience Designer Alex Faaborg explained that microformats are sometimes
referred to as the lower-case semantic Web, since they are not as complex or as
expressive as RDF and OWL .

"While microformats are less formal, they are also easier to author, and the
semantic information is human readable, in addition to being machine
readable," Faaborg said. "But it isn't about one approach being better than
the other, as much as each approach being useful in different situations."

Technically speaking, though microformats and the Semantic Web are now
actually interoperable as the W3C has announced that GRDDL (Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages) now extracts data from microformats and make it part of the Semantic Web.

The browser vendors

There are two parts to the basic Web experience. There are the Web sites that
have the content and then there are the Web browsers that provide a
mechanism to view the content. Both parts have a role to play in the
microformatted Web.

On the browser side, one of the most popular ways that Internet users are
able to dig into microformats is the Operator extension for Mozilla's
Firefox browser.

The Operator project is led by IBM employee Michael Kaply
who explained that he has contributed the work to Mozilla as part of Mozilla
Labs. Mozilla Labs is a way for people to try out new technology with the
potential for that technology to become a part of Firefox or other Mozilla
products. To date Kaply claims that Operator has had over 30,000 downloads.

"I think Operator is giving people a new way to interact with data on the
Web," Kaply told InternetNews.com. "It's a variation on what some
people call 'instant mashups.' The idea is that rather than having to rely
on other people to integrate data on multiple Web sites via traditional
mashups, tools like Operator can provide the end-user a way to instantly
pass data between multiple Web sites."

Beyond the Operator extension, Mozilla is working on integrating
microformats into the core browsing experience.